Sharif Digital Repository

E-learning is a broad set of methodologies and software’s, based on information technology, which provides learning opportunities for people of different backgrounds regardless of their location and time. E-learning has not only recently experienced a major uptake in business and academia, but has also proven itself as a necessity for most learners in different fields. This said, it is needless to mention that it has also encountered some difficulties and setbacks along its way to educational dominance. User satisfaction or customer satisfaction is one of the major means by which one can evaluate the success of such programs. Organizations on the other hand are incorporating behavioral... 

Today, many organizations are active in service industry, and many others are planning to take part in. Phone call is the simplest channel between an organization and the customers, and these organizations devise call centers to acquire, retain and create value for customers. On the other hand, human resource in call center is the key element to identify problems, and improve performance. This research aims to provide a competency model for a firm which provides access to internet and has a call center for after-sales support. BEI method with a process-driven approach was used to gather information from call center employees, and related themes were extracted from the information with theme... 

In addition to investigating the overall situation of healthcare information systems (HIS) in Iranian hospitals, in this thesis the goal is to determine the key elements of success and failure in the implementation of HIS. With the advent of the computer systems in Iran and due to the successful and unsuccessful experiences of organizations, the necessity of detecting the influential elements in this field is perceived even more than before. Another importance of this research is because of the essential role of the cultural and social factors in the success of these systems; this claim can be justified by observing different results founded by researchers from different countries. In this... 

In drilling oil well with respect to depth of several thousand meters, knowing the physical conditions of down-hole well such as temperature, pressure and stress have particular importance in prevention of possible injuries such as breaking the drill bit or increasing temperature. If these data can transfer from down-hole to bore-hole of the well, the operators can prevent from critical conditions such as intertangle of the drill-string. Currently, because of this lack of information, there are irreparable damages in oil industry annually. Based on researches, because of down-hole conditions of the well, these data can’t transfer with electromagnetic telemetry. Currently one of the data... 

Drilling in oil industry, is an expensive process in produce and extract oil from well. Any mistake in drilling may cause many drawbacks for industry owners. Phisic’s quantities information at downhole like tempreture, pressure and force on bit synchronously can inform user from torrid conditions and prevent undesired events by actions like evoke bit from downhole or change at rotation velocity in drilling and finally stop operations. With attention to a lot of problems in data transport from long distance more than one kilometer from downhole, scientists believe that one of the methods to do this process is converting data gathered at the bottom hole to acoustic waves and transmit them to... 

New development in material fabrication resulted in functionally graded materials (FGM) with properties, can vary continuously based on the desired purpose. Vast applications of these materials attracted scientists to extend the researches in this area. One of the promising applications of these materials is in the optimized spherical and cylindrical pressure vessels. Optimization is usually based on the minimization of heat transfer and maximization of the strength of the vessel under pressure. In the present dissertation, spherical and cylindrical pressure vessels are designed and characteristics of the material distribution for certain pressure and temperature is developed. In this... 

Image classification is one of the most challenging issues in computer vision. One sort of such classifications is Scene Classification. To perform automatic classification reserchers used many aproches.The general approach used features directly extracted from the image, such as color and texture or features extracted by the SIFT algorithmetc. Another method is based on recognizing object of the Scene (espessially indoor scene). This method is based on finding of a limited number of prespecified objects. In the proposed method, first a window surrounding each objects, (regardless of the type of object) founded. Then the SIFT feature is extracted from that window. All features (corresponding... 

Regarding the numerous casualties and financial losses due to intense earthquakes, the ductility is considered of the main importance in addition to stability, stiffness, and strength criteria of the structure’s connections. In order to enhance the seismic behavior of the structures in such severe earthquakes, design codes for steel structures have suggested special types of connections. Among them, bolted end plate connection is considered a conventional type of connection used for creating ductile semi-rigid connection.In this study, in order to simulate the behavior of this joint, a 3-D finite element model is developed in Abaqus software, in which the inelastic behavior of the materials... 

Atomic force microscope (AFM) has a significant capability of imaging surface topography on an atomic scale. It is also widely used for Nanolithography in MEMS/NEMS (micro/nanoelectromechanical systems). Conventional AFMs consist of a cantilever with a sharp conical or pyramidal tip located at the free end of the cantilever that plays an important role in AFM measurements. Scanning across a surface, AFM interacts with the sample surface through its tip. Although the dynamic behavior of the AFM cantilever is complicated, the researchers have been interested in studying AFM dynamic behavior because it has a great influence on the surface imaging process. The imaging rate and contrast of... 

Today, with the spread of various videos especially sports video and availability of them, the need for automated methods for search and retrieval of concepts from videos is strongly felt. On the other hand, summarizing video in order to making significant parts of them available is very important. One of the broadest scope that researchers have provided methods for extracting semantic concepts, is soccer videos. Often to extract high-level events, we need a definition and use of intermediate concepts. In this thesis "replay", "audio highlights" and "view type" are used to extract important events in the game. Here, two new methods are introduced for replay detection and view type... 

Gene regulatory network consists of a set of genes; interacting with each other via their protein products. Such interations lead to the regulation of the genes’ production rate. A breakdown in the regulatory process, may lead to some kinds of diseases. Therefore, understanding the gene regulatory process, is beneficial for both diagnosis and treatment. In this thesis, gene regulatory networks are modeled by the means of dynamic Bayesian networks. We have used sampling based methods, in order to learn the network structure. As these methos have a very high computational cost; we have used a correlation test to prune the search space. This way, an undirected network skeleton is obtained; for... 

With respect to the introduction of bio-material into cells (transfection) , microinjection is a highly efficient technique amongst existing methodologies. In cell injection, a manipulator injects the needle into a cellwhich is hold by a pipet mechanism. The moving range for the needle in this operation is of centimeter order and the resolution for the needle tip should be less than the cell’s diameter. In this thesis a Stewart system is used as for the manipulator. Stewart systems are used in flight simulators systems for decades, as mechanisms which are capable of providing multi-axis movements. In high accuracy positioning and multi-axis applications Stewart systems are highly reliable.... 

In accomplishment of knowledge management in real world, organization can be in different processes of awareness about importance of knowledge management and its achievements. Recognition of strength and weakness points of organization helps to logical planning and success in performance of knowledge management. For avoiding from failing in knowledge management projects, it is necessary that before stating for project performance, evaluate development level of organization from viewpoint of knowledge management, and determine some approaches for control of general problems of knowledge management, like abundance of information, work complexities, knowledge Storage.
In literature of... 

Image registration is the process of matching two or more images captured at different times, angles or even sensors. Image registration is finding a transformation between two images. Image registration has many applications in different fields of Image Processing and machine vision. In the field of remote sensing, image registration can be used for environmental monitoring, generating graphical maps and gathering data for geogeraphical information systems, also in the field of medical image processing it can be used to detect tumor growth. Generally whenever there is need to extract information from many images; image registration is considered as an important pre-processing step.... 

Recent research in the field of earthquake engineering has seen the development of a number of different displacement-based seismic design (DBD) methods. Such methods aim to overcome limitations with the force-based design methods incorporated in current codes, and the most developed DBD method currently available is the Direct DBD approach, presented by Priestley. The objective of this work is to investigate the performance of the Direct DBD design procedure for steel moment-resisting frame structures. For this purpose, a series of regular steel MRF frames, varying from 4 to 20 stories in height are designed based on DDBD approach and utilizing displacement design spectrum of the Iranian... 

Concrete has long been considered by engineers as one of the most used constructional materials. Therefore, recognition of mechanical behavior of concrete materials is of particular importance. So, extensive studies have been undertaken to understand and analyze its behavior under different loading conditions. Based on these studies, many models for describing the behavior of concrete are presented. Of these, many models are based on the combination of plastic theory and damage mechanics, and by using them, significant success has been achieved in the correct modeling of concrete materials. On the other hand, one of the important loading conditions encountered by concrete structures is in... 

FE simulations have been widely used to investigate the response of the brain tissue in various circumstances. The accuracy of the material models critically affects the results of the numerical simulation. However, despite the numerous studies aiming for the material modeling of the brain, there is still divergence between the results reported in the literature. A part of this discrepancy is due to the inherent difference between samples. Nonetheless, another part of it is resulted from the differences between testing protocols used by researchers. In some protocols multiple mechanical tests are performed on each sample. Enough recovery time should be considered between consecutive test... 

Price prediction in financial markets is an exciting problem for a vast majority of groups and people; however, investment portfolio managers and owners are always looking for holistic predic-tion approaches and tools having high functional accurate metrics. Strictly speaking, players in fi-nancial markets are always in search of methods and toolboxes since they need to overcome the un-certainty of their buy, sell, or hold decisions in order to reduce the investment risk. In this research, we have tried to deal with the stock price prediction problem as an asset pricing problem and find a novel approach to push forward the state-of-the-art of the problem based on the fundamental pric-ing... 

Microelectromechanical have wide application in mechanic, aerospace, medical, transport and information technology.
Due to large scale application and production, low costs and low energy consumption, these systems have been used in wide range of fields of engineering. Electrostatically actuated microbeams are extensively used as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) such as microswitch and microresonator. The main component of electrically driven is microbeam. Microbeam acts as top surface of a capacitor with fixed bottom. The capacitance of capacitor changes due to the deflection of the microbeam. In this study static deflection of electrostatically actuated microbeam has been... 

Buckling-Restrained Braced Frame system (BRBFs) are a new type of steel seismic-load-resisting system that has found use in several countries because of its efficiency and its promise of seismic performance far superior to that of conventional braced frames. The system is addressed in the 2005 edition of the AISC Seismic Provisions for Structural Steel Buildings, also a set of design provisions has been developed by NEHRP. This thesis illustrates the seismic design of buckling-restrained braced frames and compares its seismic performance with the performance of ordinary bracing systems. This work investigates the advantage and disadvantages of this new type of seismic resisting. By having...